[Rails, RSpec] The config.gem rake task chicken and egg thing

Testing RSpec
1

Sorry folks, because I know this has been asked before but I don’t
remember anyone giving enough detail for me to sort this out the way I
want to.

How do I change my rake tasks to silently fail if they can’t require
rspec?

I can do this:

begin
require ‘spec/rake/spectask’

 ... the whole Rake task ...

rescue LoadError
puts “Unable to load RSpec - do you need to install the gem?”
end

… but that seems insane to have to indent all the code inside that
big begin / rescue block. I’m sure there’s a way to exit the script
without causing the whole rake loading chain to fail, but what is it?
I tried ‘exit 0’ but that seems to exit the whole process.

So I guess this is more a Ruby question than an RSpec question really,
but I’m sure a good answer will help a few other people out too.

Matt W.
http://blog.mattwynne.net

2

Matt W. wrote:

require 'spec/rake/spectask'

without causing the whole rake loading chain to fail, but what is it?
I tried ‘exit 0’ but that seems to exit the whole process.

So I guess this is more a Ruby question than an RSpec question really,
but I’m sure a good answer will help a few other people out too.

I suppose you could override describe:

begin
require ‘spec/rake/spectask’
rescue LoadError
Kernel.warn “Unable to load RSpec - do you need to install the gem?”

class << self
  def describe(*args)
    # do nothing
  end
end

end

Scott